Blue Skies on Mars
by The Carnivorous Muffin
Summary: At the end of Morgan's dream, the dead Kuato, played by none other than the strange boy from the arcade in the body of a Martian mutant comes to speak about self, memory, and Tom Riddle. Side fic to "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus"


**Author's Note: A warning that this is a side fic of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" and if you aren't caught up to chapter 48 or so you will be very very confused.**

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Together, Morgan and the man, the man wearing Wizard Trotsky's face who was anyone but him, brunette, athletic, sleazy, and demure, dressed in black and red and timeless familiarity, both stared up at the Martian blue sky in awe. The air, for once, pure and clear and breathable with a sky as blue as any sky on Earth.

"I can't believe it," the man, the man from the dream, the dream of Mars and agents and everything she couldn't remember, said, "It's like a dream."

Morgan, abruptly, stiffened. She watched as the blue of the sky became a shade darker, as the cold and unforgiving stars burned through, looking down on her in cruel and indifferent judgement.

"What's wrong?"

Morgan opened her mouth, tasted the cold sterile air, no longer feeling so breathable, "I just had a terrible thought."

She turned, looked up at him, stared into his pale blue eyes that burned, burned like the Martian stars themselves as Morgan hesitantly, with terror in her voice, asked, "What if this is a dream?"

The words, somehow, echoed. At the very sound of them the Wizard Trotsky who was not him shattered, like glass, pieces of him silently and irreversibly splintered until all that was him was left crumbling to the earth then blowing in the wind and out towards the stars.

She watched him go, watched as the world splintered, as the blue sky flickered out, as the stars grew larger, brighter, and more wretched for it. And soon there was no more Lenin, no Rekall, no more Cohaagen, no Hauser, no homicidal wives, no Kuatos, no Mars, there was nothing.

There was only herself, nameless, staring out into the empty desert and then across to the empty void of space. She let out a laugh, clutching her sides, a great and terrible cry of mirthful despair out into the endlessness.

"Was it ever not a dream?"

She turned behind her, and there, sitting upon the side of the great red mountain, was none other than the symmetrical pale boy with dark eyes, wearing the skin of a symmetrical pale man this time, for his role as Kuato, looking down at her with no human expression at all.

Perhaps that was warranted, after all, he had starred as something barely recognizable as human, a mutant. Even so, even for a mutant, even in the script of the dream, he had lacked something essential. Though his face was perfect, human in all qualities and symmetrical to the point of inhumanity, because of that he had seemed monstrous.

"I would have preferred…" she cut herself off, not daring to say it aloud, not daring to want anything more than she already had. Looking out towards the desert, towards the stars, towards the empty Martian colony stricken by poverty and greed, she noted what wanting had gotten her.

"What do you want, Mr. Quaid?"

He had asked her this earlier, much earlier in the story, and so shoving her hands into her pockets and with one last mirthful chuckle of despair she responded, "The same as you, to remember."

"But why?"

The answer, as before, remained the same. More, it was perhaps more true now than it had even been before, "To be myself again."

"You are what you do," the Rabbit wearing the face of a man, a mutant, Kuato, repeated to her, "A man is defined by his actions, not his memory."

"And yet," she said, staring out into the void.

"And yet," he echoed for her, then, his eyes as dark as the night sky beyond all stars, he said, "You once existed without memory, without body, without thought."

He then nodded to the resting place of the doppelganger of Wizard Trotsky, "You once existed without him."

She said nothing, noticing now that at some point, her shoes had forgotten themselves, so that she was standing barefoot in the desert, the rocks biting into the soles of her feet.

"He forgets himself far more often than you do," he said, and here there was a shadow of contempt, of dismissal and irritation, inside that voice which contained no inflection at all, "Even with the crutch of memory."

"None the less," she answered.

"None the less," he echoed dully but in his words were far more than she would have expected, could have expected or desired, and though her memory was an empty shell, filled and unfilled at will by recall and Cohaagen and powers she dare not name, there was the thought that she knew this man, this boy, this rabbit, this thing.

And that thought, sentiment, humanity, from him was something to be feared above all else. It would only ever be a replication, a patchy facsimile, whose purpose meant nothing good for anyone.

With that thought, just before Mars, the dream, or perhaps simply reality itself collapsed in on itself, Kuato the rabbit's lips quirked into a small, ever so slight, ever so polite, smile.

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 **Author's Note: Written for the 3900th review of Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus by LunarCatNinja who asked for a fic where, Rabbit makes comments about Tom's feelings for Lily and it disturbs her, well, Rabbit's not usually quite that blatant, so we get some of Morgan the Lily's Total Recall themed dream in which, yes, Rabbit plays Kuato. Because Rabbit actually would make a very good Kuato. And to those of you who haven't seen that film, well... Yes. Consider this creepy Rabbit being creepy as usual.**

 **Thanks for reading, reviews are appreciated.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.**


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